How deceptive are deceptive visualizations?: An empirical analysis of common distortion techniques

Anshul Vikram Pandey; Katharina Rall; Margaret L. Satterthwaite; Oded Nov; Enrico Bertini

doi:10.1145/2702123.2702608

How deceptive are deceptive visualizations? An empirical analysis of common distortion techniques

Anshul Vikram Pandey, Katharina Rall, Margaret L. Satterthwaite, Oded Nov, Enrico Bertini

Technology Management and Innovation

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution

Abstract

In this paper, we present an empirical analysis of deceptive visualizations. We start with an in-depth analysis of what deception means in the context of data visualization, and categorize deceptive visualizations based on the type of deception they lead to. We identify popular distortion techniques and the type of visualizations those distortions can be applied to, and formalize why deception occurs with those distortions. We create four deceptive visualizations using the selected distortion techniques, and run a crowdsourced user study to identify the deceptiveness of those visualizations. We then present the findings of our study and show how deceptive each of these visual distortion techniques are, and for what kind of questions the misinterpretation occurs. We also analyze individual differences among participants and present the effect of some of those variables on participants' responses. This paper presents a first step in empirically studying deceptive visualizations, and will pave the way for more research in this direction.

Original language	English (US)
Title of host publication	CHI 2015 - Proceedings of the 33rd Annual CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Subtitle of host publication	Crossings
Publisher	Association for Computing Machinery
Pages	1469-1478
Number of pages	10
ISBN (Electronic)	9781450331456
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1145/2702123.2702608
State	Published - Apr 18 2015
Event	33rd Annual CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI 2015 - Seoul, Korea, Republic of Duration: Apr 18 2015 → Apr 23 2015

Publication series

Name	Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - Proceedings
Volume	2015-April

Other

Other	33rd Annual CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI 2015
Country/Territory	Korea, Republic of
City	Seoul
Period	4/18/15 → 4/23/15

Keywords

Deceptive visualization
Empirical analysis
Evaluation

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Software
Human-Computer Interaction
Computer Graphics and Computer-Aided Design

Access to Document

10.1145/2702123.2702608

Cite this

Pandey, A. V., Rall, K., Satterthwaite, M. L., Nov, O., & Bertini, E. (2015). How deceptive are deceptive visualizations? An empirical analysis of common distortion techniques. In CHI 2015 - Proceedings of the 33rd Annual CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems: Crossings (pp. 1469-1478). (Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - Proceedings; Vol. 2015-April). Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/2702123.2702608

How deceptive are deceptive visualizations? An empirical analysis of common distortion techniques. / Pandey, Anshul Vikram; Rall, Katharina; Satterthwaite, Margaret L. et al.
CHI 2015 - Proceedings of the 33rd Annual CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems: Crossings. Association for Computing Machinery, 2015. p. 1469-1478 (Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - Proceedings; Vol. 2015-April).

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution

Pandey, AV, Rall, K, Satterthwaite, ML, Nov, O & Bertini, E 2015, How deceptive are deceptive visualizations? An empirical analysis of common distortion techniques. in CHI 2015 - Proceedings of the 33rd Annual CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems: Crossings. Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - Proceedings, vol. 2015-April, Association for Computing Machinery, pp. 1469-1478, 33rd Annual CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI 2015, Seoul, Korea, Republic of, 4/18/15. https://doi.org/10.1145/2702123.2702608

Pandey AV, Rall K, Satterthwaite ML, Nov O, Bertini E. How deceptive are deceptive visualizations? An empirical analysis of common distortion techniques. In CHI 2015 - Proceedings of the 33rd Annual CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems: Crossings. Association for Computing Machinery. 2015. p. 1469-1478. (Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - Proceedings). doi: 10.1145/2702123.2702608

Pandey, Anshul Vikram ; Rall, Katharina ; Satterthwaite, Margaret L. et al. / How deceptive are deceptive visualizations? An empirical analysis of common distortion techniques. CHI 2015 - Proceedings of the 33rd Annual CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems: Crossings. Association for Computing Machinery, 2015. pp. 1469-1478 (Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - Proceedings).

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